Women, work and the economy

Feminist scholars research impacts on gender and labour
driven by the new economy.

Having grown up in Margaret
Thatcher's Britain, University of Newcastle Sociologist, Professor Lisa Adkins
experienced the impacts of economic, political and social
restructuring and the transition to neo-liberalism first hand.

"I grew up in a world of strikes, urban riots, punk,
the closing down of the manufacturing sector, the rise of service sector
employment and the mass sell off of public housing. I think my passion for my
field of research grew from the direct experience of that restructuring – an
experience of a world in transition,' Professor Adkins said.

"The major rearrangements of labour and life associated with
the new economy demand that social scientists rethink many of their key
categories of analysis, including the home, living, working, the private, the
everyday and even the future," Professor Adkins said.

"The new economy characterised by shifts away from
manufacturing to service and knowledge production has heralded a shift in the
way people work and live their lives. Through our research we want to look at
how this shift reshapes the way people live now and how it will impact the
future," Professor Adkins said.

With her passion for developing
fresh and innovative conceptual ideas about how and in what ways the economy
and world of work are changing, Professor Adkins says the network aims
to bring key scholars together to shape a novel research agenda covering such
areas as: the home, working agreements and work contracts, unemployment and
underemployment, money and finance, austerity, the law, and debt.

"Through our research we want to
shift the terms of academic and policy debate concerning gender and labour. In
particular, we want to highlight not only how female labour is a site of intense and complex activity
in the new economy, but also how such labour is a now key object of analysis
for understanding forms of economic and social change," Professor Adkins
said.

"This means moving away from some of the familiar
problematics through which we have come to understand relations between women
and work, including the idea that women must 'balance' work and life. Such
framings hold little traction in the new economy where distinctions between
working and non-working and between work and home are increasingly difficult to
draw."

The expansions in the employment of
women is one area the network is focused on because it's often understood as simply
a 'good' thing, but Professor Adkins says there are important issues at play
which go beyond this straightforward understanding.

"It's not just about the consequences of
contemporary employment for women or issues such as care deficits, the use of contracted
labour for care work and domestic labour, or the loss of a work/life balance,"
Professor Adkins said.

"Instead the central issue is a transformation of
capitalist accumulation in which women's labour is centrally entangled. Indeed,
in our current moment women's labour is a site of complex and intense activity.
By understanding this complexity and activity we can, I believe, come to grips
with major forms of social change, crucially including transformations to
capitalist accumulation processes."

Professor Adkins says that with
increasingly few borders between work and life, it's becoming more important to
understand the contemporary economy and work, which in turn allows us to
understand life in a much broader sense.

"There are
also processes at work within contemporary capitalism which are all about the
making of social inequalities in new kinds of ways. One of these processes is
what the geographer David Harvey has called 'accumulation by dispossession'
particularly via debt," Professor Adkins said. "So understanding the economy
necessarily means confronting how new forms of inequality are being made and
shaped."

"We are at a moment in which all manner of
certainties regarding the economy, work and employment are in doubt. This is a
moment of the vast accumulation of wealth, but also of wage stagnation,
underemployment, precarity and unemployment," Professor Adkins said. "It's our
job as social scientists to understand these apparently discontinuous and
contradictory processes."

Professor Adkins has served on the Australian Research Council's College of Experts over the last three
years and has previously served on the Academy of Finland's Expert Panel (Division of Society and
Culture).

"As well
as hard work, this service is immensely exciting and rewarding as you get to
play a part in the shaping of research and national research cultures," Professor
Adkins said.

A further
highlight has been various Visiting Fellowships and Professorships that she has
held during the course of her career."These kinds of positions are vital for
intellectual exchange and in my view are 'core business' for any academic. In
2014 I will hold a Guest Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Social
Research, University of Tampere, Finland, and will be a Visiting Scholar, at the Kent Centre for Law,
Gender, Sexuality (KLGS) at the University of Kent, UK, (2014). I have also
recently held a Visiting Scholar position at the McGill Institute for Gender,
Sexuality and Feminist Studies, (IGSF), McGill University, Canada (2011-2012),"
Professor Adkins said.

Feminist scholars research impacts on gender and labour driven by the new economy.Having grown up in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, University of Newcastle Sociologist, Professor Lisa Adkins experienced the impacts of economic, political and social restructuring and the transition to neo-liberalism…

Career Summary

Biography

Lisa Adkins holds the BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Science. She currently holds an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professorship (FiDiPro), 2015-2019. This award carries a $AUD 1.1 million (equiv.) grant to research 'Social Science in the C21st'. (http://socialscienceforthec21st.com/). This award is jointly hosted by the University of Tampere and the University of Turku.

Before coming to the University of Newcastle in 2010 she was Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has also held posts at the University of Manchester, the Australian National University, and the University of Kent. She was a member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts (Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences Panel), 2011-13.

The BHP Billiton Research framework brings together and extends Professor Adkins’ significant research and publication record in the areas of economic sociology, social and cultural theory and social science methodology. Details of the BHP Billiton Research Framework “Labouring Futures” can be found @ http://labouringfutures.com/. Her research on the conditions of labour in post-Fordism is extended in her ARC Discovery Project (2015-17) project on employment activation (DP 150101772).

Lisa Adkins is joint Editor-in-Chief of Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor and Francis).

Research ExpertiseLisa Adkins' research interests and contributions to sociology fall into three main areas: feminist theory and the sociology of gender, social and cultural theory, and economic sociology (especially the sociology of post-industrial economies and the new political economy). In the area of the sociology of gender, her interventions have included a broad scale exploration of shifting formations of gender in late modernity. Her contributions to economic sociology have included both empirical and theoretical interventions. A current project considers changing temporalities of labour and value. Finally, in the area of social and cultural theory her work includes a wide-ranging critical exploration of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Key publications include Gendered Work (1995), Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity (2002), (with Beverley Skeggs) Feminism After Bourdieu (2005) and (with Celia Lury) Measure and Value (2012). She has also edited special issues of the following journals: Australian Feminist Studies, The European Journal of Social Theory, NORA: The Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, and The Sociological Review. The BHP Billiton Research framework brings together and extends Professor Adkins’ extensive research and publication record in the areas of economic sociology, social and cultural theory and social science methodology. Details of the BHP Billiton Research Framework “Labouring Futures” can be found @ www.labouringfutures.com Lisa Adkins convenes the international research network: 'New Times: Transforming Feminist Political Economies'. http://newtimesnetwork.org/

Teaching ExpertiseLisa Adkins has extensive experience in programme development and curriculum development at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She has convened MA programmes at the University of Manchester and Goldsmiths, University of London where she was also Director of Graduate Studies in Sociology. Her teaching expertise extends to: feminist theory, sociology of gender, economic sociology, sociological methodology and social theory. In her current post, she coordinates and teaches the 3rd year sociology capstone course, 'Studying the Social'.

Administrative ExpertiseLisa Adkins has extensive leadership, managerial and administrative experience at universities in the the UK and Australia. At the University of Manchester, she was on the senior management team of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Cultural Theory Institute. At Goldsmiths, University of London, she held the post of Director of Graduate Studies and was on the Departmental Senior Management Team where she was responsible for overall strategic leadership with respective to graduate programmes and research training. At the University of Newcastle she is the Ourimbah Campus Director of Research Development. She has completed a comprehensive programme of formal leadership, management and performance management training.

CollaborationsAs a FiDiPro Distinguished Professor, Lisa Adkins has formal institutional affiliation in Finland with the University of Tampere and the University of Turku where she spends one semester each year (2015-2019). Lisa Adkins currently convenes the international research network, 'New Times: Transforming Feminist Political Economies '. http://newtimesnetwork.org/ The network has organised two invitational workshops ("Gender and Labour in New Times"), a special issue of the journal Australian Feminist Studies, an a stream for the 2014 international, biannual 'Gender, Work and Organization' Conference (UK).

Qualifications

PhD (Sociology), Lancaster University - England

Bachelor of Arts (Urban Studies)(Honours), University of Sussex - UK

Keywords

Contemporary social and cultural theory

Economic Sociology (the sociology of post-industrial economies, the new political economy)

Feminist theory

Social and Cultural theory

Sociology of Gender

Fields of Research

Code

Description

Percentage

160806

Social Theory

40

160807

Sociological Methodology and Research Methods

30

220306

Feminist Theory

30

Professional Experience

UON Appointment

Title

Organisation / Department

Professor of Sociology

University of NewcastleSchool of Humanities and Social ScienceAustralia

Academic appointment

Dates

Title

Organisation / Department

1/05/2014 - 2/05/2014

Visiting Profesor

Visiting Professorship

University of TampereSchool of Social Sciences and HumanitiesFinland

1/02/2014 - 1/04/2014

Visiting Scholar

University of KentKent Centre for Law, Gender and SexualityUnited Kingdom

Chapter (12 outputs)

Year

Citation

Altmetrics

Link

2014

Adkins L, 'Luc Boltanski and the Problem of Time: Notes Towards a Pragmatic Sociology of the Future', The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the 'Pragmatic Sociology of Critique', Anthem Press, London and New York 517-538 (2014) [B1]

Journal article (31 outputs)

What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding p... [more]

What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice-remedying substance in a crisis-ridden and (still thoroughly) financialised reality? While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economic inequalities under austerity, in this article I suggest that such a redistributive logic fails to account for the shifting capacities of resources, including the capacities of money. To track these shifting capacities, I revisit the demands of the 1970s women's liberation movement and especially the assumptions at play in these demands that money both measure and distribute justice. While these assumptions were arguably politically efficacious in that moment, in the contemporary present, pervasive financialisation has involved a material transformation to the capacities of money, a transformation that, I will suggest, leaves its justice-distributing potential in doubt. This article therefore not only calls for careful exploration of the capacities of resources in analyses of crisis, recession and austerity, but also for feminist theory to rethink redistributive justice in the light of such transformations. Central to these considerations is money in the wages form.

Research Supervision

Current Supervision

The Implications of Public Gendered Violence Discourses on Women's Embodied Social Navigation in Contemporary AustraliaPublic Health, Faculty of Health and MedicineCo-Supervisor

2015

Employment Activation in Australia: The Experience of Labour Activation by Green Corps Job Seekers.Studies In Human Society, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

2013

Music in the Valley: Identity, Memory and Reinvention in Colonial Newcastle and The Hunter Valley, 1870-1879History, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

2011

Organised Irresponsibility in the Management of Water Resources- The Case of the Murray Darling River SystemAccounting, Faculty of Business and LawCo-Supervisor

2008

When Power Networks Collide: Using Actor Networks Theory to Analyse Community Consultation Undertaken for an Australian Town's Electricity SupplyStudies In Human Society, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

Past Supervision

Year

Research Title / Program / Supervisor Type

2015

Zone of Impeachment: A Post-Foucauldian Analysis of Controlled Operations Law and PolicyLaw, Faculty of Business and LawCo-Supervisor

On 5 March
2015, University of Newcastle (UON) Sociologist Professor Lisa Adkins gave the opening keynote address to the
annual conference of the Westermarck Society, the Finnish Sociological Association,
held at the University of Helsinki before a record seven hundred delegates.